Slashdot Mirror

schwit1 shares a National Review report: After three years, there is no proof that Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's infiltration of the classroom is producing actual academic improvement and results. Take Facebook's efforts for an example. The company -- under fire for privacy breaches worldwide -- is peddling something called "Summit Learning," a web-based curriculum bankrolled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Last month, students in New York City schools walked out in protest of the program. "It's annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long," freshman Mitchel Storman, 14, told the New York Post. He spends close to five hours a day on Summit classes in algebra, biology, English, world history, and physics. Teacher interaction is minimal. "You have to teach yourself," Storman rightly complained. No outside research supports any claim that Summit Learning actually enhances, um, learning. What more studies are showing, however, is that endless hours of screen time are turning kids into zombies who are more easily distracted, less happy, less socially adept, and less physically fit. Standing up to the Silicon Valley Santas and asserting your family's "right to no" may well be the best long-term gift you can give your school-age children.

Templer421 shares an article from National Review: A new study by Environmental Progress warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear-power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there's been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment. "We talk a lot about the dangers of nuclear waste, but that waste is carefully monitored, regulated, and disposed of," says Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, a nonprofit that advocates for the use of nuclear energy. "But we had no idea there would be so many panels -- an enormous amount -- that could cause this much ecological damage." Solar panels are considered a form of toxic, hazardous electronic or "e-waste," and according to EP researchers Jemin Desai and Mark Nelson, scavengers in developing countries like India and China often "burn the e-waste in order to salvage the valuable copper wires for resale. Since this process requires burning off plastic, the resulting smoke contains toxic fumes that are carcinogenic and teratogenic (birth defect-causing) when inhaled."
A spokesman for the Solar Energy Industries Association argues that the study is incorrect, and that in fact solar panels are "mainly made up of easy-to-recycle materials that can be successfully recovered and reused at the end of their useful life."

cold fjord writes "National Journal reports, 'Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA and a member of President Obama's task force on surveillance, said ... that a controversial telephone data-collection program conducted by the National Security Agency should be expanded to include emails. He also said the program, far from being unnecessary, could prevent the next 9/11. Morell, seeking to correct any misperception that the presidential panel had called for a radical curtailment of NSA programs, said he is in favor of restarting a program that the NSA discontinued in 2011 that involved the collection of "meta-data" for internet communications. ... "I would argue actually that the email data is probably more valuable than the telephony data," ... Morell also said that while he agreed with the report's conclusion that the telephone data program, conducted under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, made "only a modest contribution to the nation's security" so far, it should be continued under the new safeguards recommended by the panel. "I would argue that what effectiveness we have seen to date is totally irrelevant to how effective it might be in the future," he said. "This program, 215, has the ability to stop the next 9/11 and if you added emails in there it would make it even more effective. Had it been in place in 2000 and 2001, I think that probably 9/11 would not have happened."' — More at Politico and National Review. Some members of Congress have a different view. Even Russian President Putin has weighed in with both a zing and a defense."

An anonymous reader writes "A recurring theme in comments on Slashdot since the 9/11 attacks has been concern about the use of government power to monitor or suppress political activity unassociated with terrorism but rather based on ideology. It has just been revealed that the IRS has in fact done that. From the story: "The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election . . . Organizations were singled out because they included the words 'tea party' or 'patriot' in their applications for tax-exempt status, said Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt groups. In some cases, groups were asked for their list of donors, which violates IRS policy in most cases, she said. 'That was wrong. That was absolutely incorrect, it was insensitive and it was inappropriate. That's not how we go about selecting cases for further review,' Lerner said . . . 'The IRS would like to apologize for that,' she added. . . . Lerner said the practice was initiated by low-level workers in Cincinnati and was not motivated by political bias. . . . she told The AP that no high level IRS officials knew about the practice. Tea Party groups were livid on Friday. ... In all, about 300 groups were singled out for additional review. . . Tea Party groups weren't buying the idea that the decision to target them was solely the responsibility of low-level IRS workers. ... During the conference call it was stated that no disciplinary action had been taken by those who engaged in this activity. President Obama has previously joked about using the IRS to target people." So it's not how they choose cases for review (except when it is), and was not motivated by political bias (except that it was). Also at National Review, with more bite.

Last week you had a chance to ask former Republican staffer Derek Khanna about his well publicized firing, copyright law, and the state of the government. Read below to see his answers to your questions. Do You Still Identify Yourself as Republican?
by eldavojohn

I believe your paper would have been unpopular on both sides of the isle but did the Republican knee jerk reaction to it negatively affect your affinity with the Republican party and your efforts to further their cause? Setting aside your differences on Copyright Law with that party, are you still Republican?

Khanna: Absolutely still a Republican. In fact I actually quibble a bit with your premise. The conservative position is that our current system of copyright is not consistent with the Constitution and inhibits innovation by choosing winners and losers– and pretty much all conservative organizations have come out with that opinion. There is a difference between Republican and Conservative that I won’t get into here, but my opinions are conservative and the Republican Party reflects more of the conservative ideology.



Re:Do You Still Identify Yourself as Republican?
by alexander_686

Follow up question: If you had been a Democratic staffer, do you think you would have been fired or would have been treated differently?

That is, what is the interaction between the Republican party verses the general entrenched interests that influences both parties. I have seen many Democrats also advocate for strict IP laws.

Khanna: I’m not sure, I’m not really qualified to assess what happens on the other side of the aisle. But I would think that the memo would never have gotten written at all. The content industry traditionally supports Democrats. And the memo was written for a conservative audience based upon traditional conservative principles.



Law to guide vs. forbid
by Maximum Prophet

One complaint conservatives about liberals is that they tend to try to outlaw stuff reactively. The EPA comes to mind, forbidding property owners certain uses of their land. How can government encourage people to do the right thing without outlawing the wrong thing? How can the government "Speak Softly" but keep the "Big Stick" only when absolutely necessary? With respect to copyrights, could the government tell people it's wrong to let artists starve, while making it easy to justly compensate them for their work?

Khanna: I’m not going to go too off base here, but there are many solutions available other than regulation and forbidding conduct. Often times the market can sort it out, but if, and only if, you ensure that externalities are built in, and you ensure that the government hasn’t already messed with the incentive structures. I’m not really qualified to jump in on EPA issues. And I’m not entirely sure on the rest of your question, as a believer of the free market I don’t think that our copyright system should be built upon ensuring that ALL artists make lots of money and I think that generally the market will facilitate even easier methods of payments with newer technologies.



Re:Great minds think alike
by Tokolosh

My posting from nearly four years ago:

To quote the Constitution: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." What does "limited Times" mean? We can agree that one day is insufficient to be an incentive. We can also agree that infinity is too long to promote progress. Therefore, it stands to reason that there is some optimal duration, which both maximizes the rewards for both the inventors, and society at large. Has any research been done to determine this optimum? Is current legislation based on anything other than what lobbyists can buy for their clients?

Khanna: Terrific question. First, limited times is a term left purposefully vague allowing for Congress to change how long copyright should be. This is a reason why I never said that copyright has to be 28 years – set in stone – as the Founders had (kind of it’s a bit more complicated). And my suggested terms are just suggestions – they were designed to be a starting point for hearings to bring in data.

But I think we have to make arguments for why longer than the Founder term is sound. Arguments like, “Our Founder system of 28 years was premised upon a market of x, and today the market is y, which requires a longer recoupment period for the content producer etc.” But of course that wouldn’t justify our current system of life + 70. In my Cato Unbound piece I go through some of the studies on this topic that pretty conclusively find that there is no incentive to content producers for such a long copyright period.

From the piece:

“Research further shows that our system of copyright is suboptimal at best and significantly counterproductive at worst. For much of our history, copyright required registration to receive the full benefit of the extension. If a longer copyright term were critical to provide sufficient incentive to content producers then we would expect, particularly when copyright terms were much shorter, that content producers would choose to extend their copyright. But during the era of registration, Congress found that only “a very small percentage of copyrights are ever renewed.”[2] They found that the rate of renewal in the 1880s was 15%, and less than half of all works were originally registered at all. If a much longer copyright term of life plus 70 years is so necessary, then why did all these content producers choose to only have 28 years of protection rather than the optional 42 years available at the time?

As William Patry argues in his book How to Fix Copyright,

Was there a single author in the world who said, ‘A term of copyright that only lasts for my life plus fifty years after I die is too short. I will not create a new work unless copyright is extent to last for my life plus seventy years’? There is no such person. (p 57)

Several studies have confirmed this as well. In 2009, a study on the production of movies in twenty-three countries that had extended the term of copyright(pdf) found no evidence that longer terms of copyright caused the creation of more works rather than the prior, shorter term. Another study from the University of Cambridge found that the optimal copyright term is 15 years(pdf), with a 99% confidence interval extending up to 38 years. Even the Congressional Research Service concluded that there was at most a small change in incentive in the extension of copyright term.

If there are no or only minimal benefits to this change, what are the costs?”

So in answer to your question there has been a lot of research. We have cross-country research so we know generally what works. And while the data may show slightly different things, it all shows that life + 70 offers us nothing and actually depresses available content. Current legislation is not based upon this discussion, I don’t recall that being the topic of discussion for the last extension, but it should be particularly when the industry comes knocking in 2019 to ask for life + 90 to keep Steamboat Willy from entering the public domain.

I got into some relevant detail in another more recent essay for Cato-Unbound:

“There are certainly legitimate arguments that copyright should be longer than that of our Founders because of certain market conditions that are different from their day – but there are not legitimate argument to say that a system of indefinite copyright abides by the Constitution or our the express intentions of our Founders.

Despite the American history on Copyright, some still argue that copyright should be or could be a perpetual right that exists forever. Many of them have lobbied successfully on a regular basis to ensure that certain highly-lucrative works never enter the public domain. Some against copyright reform hide behind the shadows of claiming that they are not for an indefinite copyright – but every twenty/thirty years they lobby to extend copyright from 56 years, to life + 50, to life +70. It’s very clear what their intentions are. They intend and have largely succeeded in destroying anything of value entering the public domain. Success in perverting the law should not be misinterpreted for constitutional fidelity despite their property law arguments using 18th century vernacular. These proponents are arguing for something very different from what the Founders believed.

Frankly they lost the argument 226 years ago. The Founders explicitly rejected this position.”



Down the Pipe
by CanHasDIY

Is there any future legislation that you know of / heard about during your time as a staffer that we, the People, should get a heads-up on? Specifically, anything nefarious regarding things like copyright, patents, digital property and/or privacy, et. al?

Khanna: Patents need to be fixed and we obviously need major privacy legislation such as ECPA reform etc. I talked about some of the upcoming privacy issues in my interview with Techdirt. I was always particularly concerned with drone strikes against US citizens so I’m happy that is finally receiving some real attention by MSM and the American people.

As I wrote in my piece in the National Review, I think we can do a much better job in allocating visas to high-skilled workers – and I think there is an actual way to accomplish that goal as outlined in the article or other ideas along a similar thought process (perhaps by providing greater help for small businesses acquiring H-1Bs).

But more on topic, we should keep an eye on the Transpacific Partnership Treaty (TPP) because it will be codifying provisions of the DMCA that are very problematic. The DMCA has been used to make some technology “contraband” and to stifle political speech. While we need to protect intellectual property, the DMCA has proved to be a terrible law. It should not be entirely surprising that the DMCA may need revisions and oversight. The DMCA was passed three years before the iPod, six years before Google Books and nine years before the Kindle. But now that it's clear that the DMCA is being interpreted in a way clearly contrary for which it was passed, it’s incumbent upon Congress to act.The idea of putting the DMCA into an international agreement is a very bad idea. If in the United States it has been used to justify censorship of political speech, imagine what other countries will do that don’t have the First Amendment and are looking for legal structure to justify censorship.

This is a big fight and as a Congressional staffer we weren’t allowed to read it – so very scary stuff and I think an unprecedented level of secrecy on this. I also touched upon this in the Cato Unbound piece:

“This treaty includes provisions on intellectual property that are above and beyond those in the Berne Convention. Setting controversial and contested copyright terms in stone through treaty was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. It’s an affront to the legislative process to try to “re-codify” legislative wins into treaty agreements. That would make it significantly more difficult to ever change course.

The length of copyright terms has always received significant debate and disagreement. This was likely the intention of the Founders in not specifying what a "limited time" meant within the Constitution itself. But current drafts of the TPP allegedly establish the law at life plus 70 years. Additionally, it would include or even expand portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) relating to anti-circumvention technologies. To be clear, I am strongly against unauthorized copyright infringement, but the DMCA outlawing of anti-circumvention technologies is extremely controversial—and rightfully so.

The DMCA created rules that until recently made it illegal to jailbreak your own iPhone or to develop a program to read a Kindle book aloud to someone who is blind. The DMCA still bars developing, selling, providing, or even linking to technologies that play legal DVDs purchased in a different region, or to convert a DVD you own to a playable file on your computer. Because no licensed DVD playing software is currently available for the Linux operating system, if a Linux user wishes to play a DVD that they have legally bought, they cannot legally play it on their own computer. The DMCA’s rules have also made legitimate fair uses of copyrighted material much harder. Using snippets of video for classrooms is legal fair use, but to do so, teachers have to use illegal technology to “rip” the DVD to a playable and editable file, or they must illegally download the file online.

Within the leaked details of the TPP Treaty there are many troubling features, but perhaps most troubling is the secrecy surrounding the negotiations. Members have been allowed to view documents, but most of their staff and the general public have been denied access. Outside of the national security realm, this type of secrecy in regard to a treaty is particularly troubling and perhaps unprecedented. Another troubling aspect is that despite this secrecy, there have been “stakeholder” presentations representing one particular side and vested interest, rather than the perspective of the general public or the requirements of our Constitution. One of the stakeholder presentations at the latest TPP negotiations was titled "The Walt-Disney Company: Creativity, Brought to you by Copyright.” At the same time, representatives from the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) were denied access and not allowed in the building for recent negotiations.”

But the recent decision by the Librarian of Congress really takes the cake, which made it illegal to unlock your own cellphone. In a recent article I stated that:

“Congress's inaction in the face of the decision by the Librarian of Congress represents a dereliction of duty. It should pass a new law codifying that adaptive technology for the blind, backing up DVD's to your computer, and unlocking and jail breaking your phone are lawful activities regardless of the decisions of the Librarian of Congress.” (article)

Our White House petition on this issue is currently at 75,000 but we have to get to 100,000 by February 23, 2013. This will be a big opportunity for advocates of sounds technology policy.



Hope?
by Hatta

How do we Americans manage to retain any hope for any sort of positive change when people who are paid to identify beneficial reforms get fired for upsetting special interests? Doesn't your case prove that it's impossible to effect reform through the system? Do you belive that Democracy in America still exists, and if so, why?

Khanna: Democracy is more than just people voting and it’s more than just activism for your candidate of choice. The people have immense power when they are united and coordinated. Unfortunately, most organizing up till now has required major organizations to set-up – but not anymore.

Members of Congress are particularly sensitive to interests from their constituents as expressed through letters, e-mail and phone calls to their office. This is why a united and coordinated movement can be so successful in stopping legislation. But activist movements, like the SOPA protest, cannot rest after stopping one bad piece of legislation. Instead, we must take the next step which is actually passing good legislation.

I imagine that ad-hoc groups of people who agree on some policy idea will form to both stop bad legislation but also to push good legislation. It will take a while to transition to that, but once that is done, then we will have much more of an effect and a substantive democracy. But that will require activism and involvement.

The cellphone unlocking issue is a perfect example of where the people could actually fix policy. The traditional players in DC are unlikely to do so on their own, the wireless industry likes the ruling, and many of the other technology companies may see this as an issue where they have little to gain– so it’s up to the people themselves to step up and say this ruling is crazy. The idea that average people can be arrested for unlocking their phones is insane. I hope that the people step up for their own property rights.



Lawmakers becoming Obsolete
by SinisterRainbow

The United States was founded as Republic, primarily (so it is said) because having individual voices was impossible with the technology of the time. However, we live in an age where the Internet has given us instant communication and access to vast information, where we can relatively securely pass information around, and where especially, we can have every voice heard to write our own bills and laws. Iceland may be small, but they have proven it's more than just a theory. We have open source books, open source software, open encyclopedia, with more 'open' type projects all the time - which have proved immensely successful and very efficient when it comes to money. However, the trend is in the opposite direction, with more power given to lawmakers and large corporations (in the de facto sense at least as contributions are now unlimited, it raises the bar of entry), and congress with it's two main parties, are in a huge poker match. What do you see as the pros and cons against an open-Bill type of system, where the power of the people get a more realistic voice, where the history can be saved for eternity, where the slightest changes can all be remembered using repositories, where anyone can contribute, where it would save multi-millions of dollars in taxes, where multiple types of Bills can be presented and the one the people wish for most receives the most votes? You have represented a party that claims they stand for smaller government, yet it's one that has increased government size as much and many times, more than democrats. Shouldn't such a system be at the forefront of Republican agenda? Or has big business lined the pockets so fat of every member in congress that this is not possible without some type of revolution..?

Khanna: You are correct that the Republican Party claims they are the party of smaller government, yet they have failed to deliver while they were in power – and conservatives are frustrated with the party for that reason. I think that Democrats have been worse in that regard, but clearly the Bush years were very bad ones for fiscal conservatism.

Your idea for a more open government and transparency is interesting, but while I want the people to be more involved in our process I do like the idea – in concept – of representative democracy (I’m not sure exactly what you are saying in that regard).



Would you do it the exact same way again?
by rmdingler

Hindsight being on the order of 20/15 or so, would you make the same bold statement, or, knowing the consequences and repercussions, would you be a bit more tactful and attempt to reform the system from within?

Khanna: I tried to reform the system from within – by doing my job. In this situation, discretion and tact was used as much as possible.



Now What?
by eldavojohn

You told other staffers when you left: Don't be discouraged by the potential consequences. You work for the American people. It's your job, your obligation to be challenging existing paradigms and put forward novel solutions to existing problems.

So now what? What's your plan? I mean, you can tell them not to be discouraged but that's a pretty hefty weight to put on your own shoulders. Anyone who gets a check from the content industry (and I think that's everyone in DC) is going to blacklist you. Do you see yourself taking a Ralph Nader-like approach to politics? How do you even get your foot back in the door? You do realize that if you don't return or rise to another kind of constituent-focused power that your above encouragement will fall upon deaf ears as you will become the example of what happens to an outspoken staffer?

Khanna: Yes, I stand by that statement. We need creative destruction of failed ideas and we need a thriving competition for promising new ideas. Not solving problems but “getting along” is not enough to fix our system at this point.

In normal times, the system can function by each of us playing a minimal role in its proper functioning – but when the system is like it is today, it requires those of us who are paying attention to be more active participants. Democracy is tough, it requires active engagement and participation.

As for me, I have a bunch of plans in the works. Right now I’m working on the cellphone unlocking issue that I mentioned because it’s outrageous and unacceptable. But it’s also a misstep by the other side and therefore it’s a strategic opportunity to restore property rights. Doing so will start to change the overall discussion on technology policy and it’s a winnable battle. I hope you will consider signing and promoting our White House petition and getting us over 100,000 by the end of the week.

I plan on continuing to write and research on sensible technology policies for our country through my fellowship with Yale Law and hopefully being a part in successful advocacy movements going forward.

Follow me on twitter to find out about my next steps. Or shoot me on twitter @Dkhanna11 and e-mail if you have ideas (Khannaderek@gmail.com).

eldavojohn writes "The global warming debate has left much to be desired in the realm of logic and rationale. One particular researcher, Michael E. Mann, has been repeatedly attacked for his now infamous (and peer reviewed/independently verified) hockey stick graph. It has come to the point where he is now suing for defamation over being compared to convicted serial child molester Jerry Sandusky. Articles hosted by defendants and written by defendant Rand Simberg and defendant Mark Steyn utilize questionable logic for implicating Michael E. Mann alongside Jerry Sandusky with the original piece, concluding, 'Michael Mann, like Joe Paterno, was a rock star in the context of Penn State University, bringing in millions in research funding. The same university president who resigned in the wake of the Sandusky scandal was also the president when Mann was being (whitewashed) investigated. We saw what the university administration was willing to do to cover up heinous crimes, and even let them continue, rather than expose them. Should we suppose, in light of what we now know, they would do any less to hide academic and scientific misconduct, with so much at stake?' Additionally, sentences were stylized to blend the two people together: 'He has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.' One of the defendants admits to removing 'a sentence or two' of questionable wording. Still, as a public figure, Michael E. Mann has an uphill battle to prove defamation in court."

DesScorp writes "AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi has a challenge for climate scientists. He wants one or more of their rank to accept a bet about temperature trends in the coming decade. Bastardi is making specific predictions. 'The scientific approach is: you see the other argument, you put forward predictions about where things are going to go, and you test them,' he says. 'That is what I have done. I have said the earth will cool .1 to .2 Celsius in the next ten years, according to objective satellite data.' Bastardi's challenge to his critics — who are legion — is to make their own predictions. And then wait. Climate science, he adds, 'is just a big weather forecast.' Bastardi's challenge is reminiscent of the famous Simon-Ehrlich Wager, where the two men made specific predictions about resource scarcity in the '80s."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "While there have been shifting reports about McCain's view on warrantless wiretapping, nothing could be clearer than the latest comment by McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, who said, 'We do not know what lies ahead in our nation's fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.' Article II, of course, is what Bush has argued gives the President virtually unlimited power during war, and McCain has already voted in favor of Telecom Immunity, though he sometimes mentions, to those asking for accountability, wanting to hold hearings about what the telecoms did."

Brian Stretch sends us to the National Review for an interview with Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig. Lessig talks about money, politics, money in politics, and his decision not to run for an open seat in Congress. From the interview: "Lessig hates corruption. He hates it so much, in fact, that last year he announced he'd be shifting away from his work on copyright and trademark law... to focus on it... 'One of the biggest targets of reform that we should be thinking about is how to blow up the FCC.'"

The National Review has a piece up entitled National Born Regulators, in which they lay out the problems with legislator decision-making processes when discussing videogames, and lay to rest some of the most common misconceptions around gaming. From the article: "Those games are the exception to the rule. The vast majority of video games sold each year do not contain intense violence or sexual themes. The Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), the video-game industry's self-regulatory labeling body, places ratings and numerous content descriptors on almost every game sold in America today. These ratings and descriptors are remarkably detailed and displayed prominently on all game cartons, making them easy for parents to evaluate."

Slashback with updates and clarifications from several previous stories -- read on below for updates on connecting continents, mechanical pong, Microsoft's ASP fix, and more.

That was fast. jsin writes "Microsoft has provided a patch for the ASP.NET exploit mentioned [on October 7th] on Slashdot, among other outlets. From the article: "To aid customers in protecting their ASP.NET applications, an HTTP module has been developed that implements canonicalization best practices. By applying this module to your web server, all ASP.NET applications on the server are protected against canoncalization problems known to Microsoft as of the publication date.""

Warring academics , never pretty. DAldredge writes with news of another side to the economic debate in academia over the plans of this year's two leading presidential candidates, pointing to this "statement Wednesday by 368 economists, including six Nobel laureates: Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, and -- the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Economics -- Edward C. Prescott. The economists warned that Sen. Kerry's policies 'would, over time, inhibit capital formation, depress productivity growth, and make the United States less competitive internationally. The end result would be lower U.S. employment and real wage growth.'"

The steel cage match with the members of the Harvard Business School opposed to Bush's economic policies has yet to be announced.

Hey Pal, would you please Pay? Daemon writes "eBay made an official announcement stating that they are stabilizing their Paypal services after a few days of problems: 'Most members are now able to log in to the PayPal site to access account information, use shipping functions, use PayPal debit cards, and pay for items online with no difficulty.'

Again, it seems there are still problems on the horizon (or hidden under?) since they say: 'Should you encounter any errors when attempting to log in or use different PayPal functions, please try again.' The full announcement can be viewed on their System Status Announcement Board."

Do please try this at home. adelayde writes "Here we have an article on a wireless IP link between Europe and Africa. It documents the full details about the 802.11b link between the two continents, traversing the Gibraltar Strait, as part of the Transacciones / Fadaiat project and with it placed within the geo-political context of immigration and freedom of movement. The announcement was originally posted to Slashdot in June 2004."

What I want to see is a mechanical Ping-Pong! yathosho writes "German magazine Spiegel Online has posted an interview with art-student Niklas Roy, creator of Pongmechanik, an electromechanical conversion of the classical game Pong."

(We mentioned this amazing looking device last month.)

An anonymous reader writes "The maintenance flight to give the Hubble Space Telescope a few more years has been cancelled, even though everyone agrees that HST does good work. But this article offers a way to save the space telescope, and to give those who think the space program should be privatized a way to prove they can do it."

Brian Stretch writes " According to the National Review: 'When President Bush delivers a speech recognizing the centenary of heavier-than-air-powered flight December 17, it is expected that he will proffer a bold vision of renewed space flight, with at its center a return to the moon, perhaps even establishment of a permanent presence there. If he does, it will mean that he has decided the United States should once again become a space-faring nation.' Here's hoping. The article also includes talk of nuclear engines and using the moon as a testbed for going to Mars."

floppy ears writes "Pseudonymous blogger Atrios has been threatened with a subpoena and lawsuit for defamation. Apparently Atrios used a headline 'Diary of a Stalker' in reference to Donald Luskin. In response to the posting, several anonymous commentators made some allegedly libelous statements about Luskin, and now Luskin has hired an attorney and started making threats and demands. The funniest thing is that Luskin has previously referred to himself as a stalker in his own headline: 'We Stalked. He Balked.'."

Lovejoy asks: "I have done extensive reading since the Columbia tragedy about what's next for human space exploration. Most of the punditry agrees that extending the shuttle program for many more years is a bad idea. So what are the practical alternatives? I've seen ideas for new spacecraft, a carbon nanotube space elevator, among other things. What are the best ideas you've seen? Will the best idea win, or the one with the most pork barrel contracts? Does space travel/exploration have to be THIS expensive? What are the best short term/long term solutions?"

Since Congress has been steadily cutting back on support for NASA, Nick suggests this idea: "I'm sure there are many taxpayers out there like me that would love to see NASA's budget doubled. The problem is there isn't enough support to get congress to increase the budget by that amount, and I really don't want people to pay that don't care to. I propose an opt-in, one-time contribution box added to tax returns. I would require that my money be used only to advance the space program with either a shuttle replacement, an extra crew compartment for the space station, or a launch vehicle for a manned trip to Mars. Would you support a bill that would allow taxpayers to voluntarily contribute money to NASA? Are you ready to put your coin where your Dreams are?"

neocon writes "Today's National Review Online has an interesting piece from John Bloom of UPI on the origin of Copy Rights (what Copyrights really are) and the current attacks on them in Congress and elsewhere."

Senators Wyden (D-Ore.) and Kyl (R-Ariz.) introduced the Global Internet Freedom Act earlier this month, setting aside $60 million over two years "to develop and deploy technologies to defeat Internet jamming and censorship." Of course they don't mean libraries and schools in this country -- they're talking about countries like China, as Kyl et al. explain in a National Review article a few days ago. I guess it wasn't confusing enough to (1) subsidize censorware and (2) criminalize researching it -- we also need to (3) subsidize researching it. How about forbidding American corporations from trading censorware goods or services to these "repressive governments," wouldn't that be a good start? Update: 10/30 03:37 GMT by J : Here's the Wired story from early this month on the version that was introduced in the House.

(Sen. Wyden also teamed up last month with Sen. Cox (R-Calif.) on a little bitty resolution standing up for your fair use rights before the tank parade of the DMCA.)

genehack writes "Long-time weblogger Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog is an excellent introduction to the currently white-hot world of weblogs. Blood covers all the bases, from a history of the weblog form, through starting a blog of your own, and finally onto finding (and retaining) readers for your site. The book doesn't offer as much for the veteran blogger, but even the bloggeratti won't go away completely empty-handed -- Blood's weblog history provides a valuable common vocabulary for debating what is and isn't a weblog, and her discussion of weblog ethics should be required reading for anybody who claims to be serious about their weblogging." Genehack's review continues below. The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog author Rebecca Blood pages 195 publisher Perseus Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer genehack ISBN 073820756X summary great introduction to world of blogging, which also offers valuable info for the experienced blogger

Blood begins the book in the obvious place, with a discussion of the history of the weblog format, and a functional definition of what a weblog is (and isn't). One issue with the word "weblog" as it is currently used is that it means little more than "website with time-stamped entries arranged in reverse chronological order". Blood attempts to expand on that definition by pointing out that the other thing weblogs have in common, in addition to chronological formatting convention, is "the primacy of the link":

"It is the link that gives weblogs their credibility by creating a transparency that is impossible in any other medium. It is the link that creates the community in which weblogs exist. It is the link the distinguishes the weblog -- or any other piece of online writing -- from old-media writing that has merely been transplanted to the Web."

One of my primary objections to this section of the book was the contradiction between the above position and Blood's inclusion, earlier in the same chapter, of "blog"- and "notebook"-style sites under the weblogs banner. "Blog"-style sites, in the book's taxonomy, are the nano-journals that showed up in the wake of easy-to-use tools like Pitas and Blogger. These web-based weblogging applications made it easy to let the world know when you were getting up from your desk to go pee -- and thousands of people jumped at the chance to do just that. "Notebook"-style web sites, on the other hand, are characterized by longer chunks of content; they tend to resemble essay collections more than anything else. Both types of sites are markedly different in content and authorial intent from the traditional "filter" style weblogs -- collections of links, annotated with short (or sometimes not so short) descriptions, reviews, or reactions.

Indeed, the former two styles of sites seem to be to be fundamentally different than the latter style, primarily in the extent to which they're inwardly versus externally focused. "Filter" weblogs link almost exclusively to other sites, and they link heavily -- usually averaging at least one link per entry, if not more. "Blogs" and "notebooks", on the other hand, have a much lower frequency of external linking, and are much more self-referential and insular than "filter" style sites. The three sorts of sites share similar formats and are produced with similar tools, but I would argue that referring to all of them as "weblogs" makes the word so generic as to render it useless as a description.

My quibbles over these taxonomic issues aside, The Weblog Handbook's introduction and definition of the "blog", "notebook", and "filter" terms to refer to the various sorts of sites that are collectively known as "weblogs" is a valuable contribution. Hopefully these words will be adopted by other writers in subsequent discussions of weblog history and form.

Blood moves on from the initial historical overview to a discussion of why someone would want to take the time and make the effort to start and maintain a weblog. She covers all the main bases: improving writing skills, improving thinking skills, and networking for personal or business reasons. This chapter might help you think of some new way to leverage your weblog to your advantage, but otherwise it struck me as somewhat redundant -- presumably, if you're interested enough to undertake reading a 200 page book about weblogs, you're interested enough to try running one for a week or a month and see what benefits you get from the exercise.

The next pair of chapters cover setting up a weblog. The target here is the new blogger, and depending on your level of technical sophistication, you might find the coverage a bit simplistic. Nevertheless, these chapters contain sound advice about choosing tools, about some of the conventions of the weblog community (permalinks, archives, sidebars), and about the all-important step of choosing a name for your weblog. After covering set-up, Blood dives into the business of actual creation: how to start writing weblog entries, and how to get better at it over time.

Blood also covers strategies for attracting and retaining readers, tempering those tips with the sage advice that webloggers that are constantly striving to get more readers will never be happy with the reader population that they currently have. This is one of the more critical points that the book has to make, in my opinion, and Blood does a good job of driving home the notion that there are better (and easier) ways of becoming famous than starting a weblog.

The sixth chapter, covering weblog community, ethics, and etiquette, is one of the book's most important. New bloggers that read this section will learn how to avoid offending established webloggers while they are starting out in the community. Bloggers that heed Blood's rules for ethical weblogging may even avoid getting sued for libel. Additionally, Blood deserves further kudos for making this section of the book freely available on her website.

Blood rounds out the book with some miscellaneous advice about maintaining a regular update schedule for your weblog, the wisdom of keeping some modicum of privacy for your off-line life, and the issues over making an email address publicly available -- opening yourself up not only to contact with your readers, but also with every spammer in the universe. None of the material in this chapter will be novel for the experienced web surfer, but Blood's thoughtful treatment is a good introduction for the neophytes that are still out there.

The book finishes up with a trio of appendices. The first covers an actual session with a particular weblog application; the second contains some practical Elements of Style-style advice on creating "linktext" -- the actual words inside a hypertext anchor; and the third offers information on the mechanics of running a weblog -- selecting a web hosting provider, buying a domain, analyzing log files, and so on.

The Weblog Handbook is a well-written, well-rounded, thoughtful introduction to the art and practice of maintaining a weblog. The author, Rebecca Blood, has taken her years of experience gained maintaining her own weblog, boiled it down into concise nuggets of information and advice, and then presented it with a vigor and enthusiasm which clearly reflects her love for the weblog form. Recommended for novice and old-school webloggers alike.

You can purchase The Weblog Handbook from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

tekan writes: "The National Review has an interesting article about the challenges ahead for the settlement of Mars (or the Moon), as well as how Law and sovereignty issues factor into colonizing these bodies." Perhaps most interesting are the reasons cited for entering into the treaty at all -- which had little to do with keeping space a peaceful utopia.

tekan writes: "The National Review has an interesting article about the challenges ahead for the settlement of Mars (or the Moon), as well as how Law and sovereignty issues factor into colonizing these bodies." Perhaps most interesting are the reasons cited for entering into the treaty at all -- which had little to do with keeping space a peaceful utopia.

Last week I came out in favor of electronic voting. Over the weekend, it turned out that its opponents' worst fears came true. Not only was some computer software buggy, but it actually threw a state election the wrong way. And though not very likely, it's even possible that this state will determine our next president! Have I changed my mind about electronic voting?

No, because the punchline is: New Mexico still uses dead trees. The bug was in the software that counts paper ballots.

New Mexico was given to Gore on election night by 6,800 votes because of buggy computer software. That software "failed to read" straight-party votes (oops!), and worse, it "also chose at least one candidate from another party."

If computer flaws had thrown an electronic-vote election, you'd be reading about it on the front page of every newspaper across the country, and pundits would be telling us (sometimes in ways very funny) how foolish we were to trust our votes to those nasty computers.

How many presidential elections does our 19th-century technology have to nearly destroy before the alternatives get serious consideration?

A friend in Sweden tells me that the U.S.A. is now being referred to as the B.R.A., the Banana Republic of America. Maybe by the 21st century we can have 20th-century voting machines installed at our polling places, what do you think?

(New Mexico could decide the election if Florida's votes are thrown out, Oregon goes to Bush, and one or two more improbabilities occur.)

Voting, right here in River(side) County Riverside County, California, used touch-screen voting in this last election. This is very different from internet voting since there was no network to the outside world. I think this is an important step and certainly should be done first.

ABC News's report describes Riverside's system and shows a photo. Randall Gardner points out that the local paper has a great story with an overview of the system and reactions from voters -- glitches, yes; late tally, yes; but all in all it sounded like a positive experience.

With a capital V and that rhymes with C and that stands for Canberra Dracophile points out an article from the Fairfax IT News website, which:

reports that voters in the Australian Capital Territory (in which our nation's capital, Canberra, lies) "could be the first in the nation to trial electronic voting at next year's territory election", according to the territory's Chief Minister, Gary Humphries. They're hoping to pass legislation next month to bring this about. Sounds cool, but the article goes on to quote Humphries as saying, "You might as well be doing it from your own home." Is it just me, or does this raise the possibility of voters being coerced into a particular vote where this sort of thing can't be seen? I'd prefer to see electronic voting available only from polling booths.

No grunge typefaces please User-interface wonks should enjoy this pure-and-simple design contest. Web Memes, Inc. is asking you to design a ballot, preferably one as unconfusing as possible while still using (spit) paper. You also get to make up your own candidates and issues.

(If the competition were digital, instead of paper, it would be a tough call between Amazon.com's new user interface and AmIPresidentOrNot.)

Busily coding your next election... ...is Jason Kitcat, who says "I'm working really hard on the next release and haven't given it the PR time it deserves." Allow me.

FREE is "Free Referenda & Elections Electronically," "the first open source system for conducting electronic votes." We're now jumping from mere electronic tallying of votes in polling places to actual internet voting, so please keep your hands inside the browser at all times.

Originally an academic thesis, FREE is now GPL'd, written in Java, and its design background is available in whitepapers. I haven't tried running it. Someone let us know if the project could be useful.

See also thebell.net, which comments:

...the majority of paper punching systems used in the U.S. do not produce repeatable results when ballots are tallied more than once, which means that election officials lack the means to objectively distinguish between fraud and error under these circumstances. ...we should in fact be looking to Internet voting systems in order to try to reduce those faults and thus provide for more security than what is available today -- not less security.

The seriously skeptical view Let's end on a sobering note. Scoffing at The Bell's claim to have tackled the subject a mere six months ago, Rebecca Mercuri points out (on Dave Farber's IP list) that others have been thinking about internet voting for over a decade. She writes:

Internet systems indeed DO promise FAR LESS in the way of auditability (recounts) and anonymity (privacy) than do the paper and other manual systems presently in place. To promote the belief that Internet voting, in any way provides a SAFE VOTE, is wholly erroneous.

She has an intimidating collection of links to (mostly) academic papers on the subject on her Electronic Voting page.

And in conclusion The only viable form of government is perl-based: we need a bicamel legislature with an eclectoral college. Thank you and good night!

And now for something completely the same! A note from timothy: The next piece in our continuing Hellmouth Revisited series is online. Feel free to go read it.

Because you're reading Slashdot, you probably know that client-side cookies are perfectly safe. They don't contain any code that gets executed by your computer, and there are limits to keep them from filling up your hard drive. Just as importantly, no server can read another server's data, each site reads only its own cookies, and you don't have to worry about privacy. If you don't want a site to know anything about you, you don't tell that site anything. Simple. Or is it?

When Netscape embraced-and-extended the HTTP spec in 1995, it was really just trying to digitize the shopping cart. Allowing a server to store just a few bits on the client added almost no overhead and it made many applications, such as shopping carts, very convenient.

Maybe it was deliberate; maybe nobody really cared; or maybe it was an engineer's simple distaste for tweaking a spec too much: but they allowed cookies to hang off GIFs as well as HTML, and that changed everything. There were probably ten people in the: world at that point who could have foreseen the explosion in banner ad traffic, yielding a multi-billion-dollar industry in less than five years.

Yes, billion -- the large banner-ad company DoubleClick merged with database firm Abacus Direct last year in a billion-dollar stock swap. How much is a billion dollars worth of advertising revenue on the net? At DoubleClick's current rate, it's about 750 billion banner ads. Think of it as four petabytes of GIFs.

And the vast majority of those GIFs just get ignored. When's the last time you clicked a banner? There aren't any precise figures, but the consensus is that the average click-through rate is dropping. Three percent click-through used to be good. Now a well-targeted ad will be happy to get one or two percent. It's hard work to make money from banners, and getting harder every day.

That's why DoubleClick, and firms like it, need to maximize their efficiency. Their income ends up depending on that click-through rate. The higher they can raise that number, the more they can justify charging their clients. Sending targeted ads becomes critical. And the only way to target you is to learn more about you.

The GIF cookie loophole makes this pretty easy. The first banner ad that your browser requested from a banner-ad company got a user ID cookie sent back with it. And - here's the key - since so many banner GIFs all come from the same company's domain name, your browser sends back the same user ID no matter which website you're viewing the banner on. Your user ID is being tracked all over the web.

In the case of DoubleClick, that's a fair number of sites. They won't talk to you unless you serve a million impressions a month - and their network includes 651 publishers which translates to who-knows how many websites. All told, they deliver a billion ads every two days.

Though the Internet Movie Database can't tell where else you've been on the web today, the company delivering its banners knows. That same company knows if you read National Review, TeenMag, or Dilbert. It knows if you're into professional wrestling or what cruises you were looking at on Travelocity. It even has some of your click history through WebMD.com.

The comforting thing has always been that, while the corporation may be able to follow your footprints around the web, at least they haven't known it's you who's making them. The disconcerting thing is, that's about to change.

Remember that billion-dollar merger between DoubleClick and the database company? This database company doesn't sell software. Abacus Direct uses databases to store names, addresses, and other information about people. In offices across the country, their computers have information on two billion purchases made from 1,100 separate consumer catalogs over the years, "representing virtually all U.S. consumer catalog buying households." Their CEO brags,

"Through the sophisticated use of state-of-the-art technologies and modeling techniques, Abacus' outstanding ability to synthesize vast amounts of data into valuable insights about individual consumer buying behaviors has proven itself to be an important marketing tool for our age."

That's why it's very interesting that DoubleClick's privacy policy changed earlier this month. Its text used to read:

"DoubleClick does not know the name, email address, phone number, or home address of anybody who visits a site in the DoubleClick Network. All users who receive an ad targeted by DoubleClick's technology remain completely anonymous."

That promise is gone without a trace from the new policy. The new policy reads:

"In the course of delivering an ad to you, DoubleClick does not collect any personally-identifiable information about you, such as your name, address, phone number or email address."

Of course not. In delivering the ad, DoubleClick just collects your user ID. It probably already has your name, address, phone number and email address, somewhere in the Abacus database.

A little further down is the portent of things to come. There is "one particular Web publisher" in their network which collects a "log-in name and demographic data about users." Which publisher is that? They don't say.

Whoever it is, you may already have given it your name and address, perhaps to register for a contest, or maybe in exchange for reading its free content. Everyone does it; it's a small price to pay. DoubleClick is already combining their demographic data (your name and address) with its own database (your viewing and clicking habits) in order to deliver more-targeted ads on this one website.

And if their programmers do their jobs right, it'll end up being a simple SQL query to join up your user ID, the name you gave the mysterious web publisher, your Abacus demographic data and catalog purchases, and the footprints you've left all over the net for the past two years, into a single big lump of your online/offline data.

To be fair, their privacy policy promises they won't start doing this without, er, changing their privacy policy:

"...should DoubleClick ever match the non-personally-identifiable information collected by DoubleClick with Abacus database information, DoubleClick will revise this Privacy Statement to accurately reflect its modified data collection and data use policies and ensure that you have adequate notice of any changes and a choice to participate."

Aren't you glad that, when DoubleClick revised its privacy statement on October13,1999, you were given adequate notice of how you were being tracked across the internet? (They've sent out 46 press releases so far this year. Informing you about weakening your privacy wasn't one of them.)

Things aren't as bad as they could be. One fortunate thing is that the banner-ad market isn't a monopoly yet. Not even close. Adbility lists over fifty ad networks, of which DoubleClick is just one of the larger ones (probably the largest).

But, when any rapidly expanding market starts to level off, the smaller and less-efficient companies get eaten. Nobody knows when the internet's growth curve will hit that point, but exponential expansion can't continue forever. At some point, the companies that can't send banner ads targeted to your community will get left behind. We'll end up with two, maybe three, meganetworks that deliver a large majority of the world's banner ads.

What can you do about it? To protect your own personal privacy, opt out of DoubleClick's cookies. Of course, this doesn't affect other banner-ad companies, who may or may not even offer this solution once they get as big as DoubleClick. It also doesn't help novice websurfers like your grandmother, who doesn't understand why she should refuse free cookies. More importantly, it can't ever be a real answer - if more than a tiny percentage of their audience ever opted out, DoubleClick would see the competitive advantage of their billion-dollar merger start to erode, and that'd be the end of that option.

What makes more sense is to close the cookie loophole. DoubleClick isn't the real problem; the HTTP spec is the problem. The browsers should change their implementation of cookies so that, by default, foreign sites can't send me cookies along with their GIFs. Why should cookies be allowed onto my hard drive if they aren't attached to the page I'm viewing?

Since DoubleClick's privacy policy claims that cookies "are not essential for us to continue our leadership," they should have no problem supporting this as the default behavior of every major web browser.